Role of intercultural mediation in problem solving in a transatlantic network

Proceedings of AELFE-TAPP 2021 (19th AELFE Conference, 2nd TAPP Conference). Vilanova i la Geltrú (Barcelona), 7-9 July 2021Working in a multidisciplinary collaborative project through virtual exchange encompasses many advantages as well as some disadvantages. One of the many problems that might occur in virtual cooperation settings was identified as cultural mismatches, listed by Chase, Macfadyen, Reeder, and Roche (2002) into nine categories. Some of these mismatches were found during the Trans-Atlantic Pacific Project1 (TAPP), a collaborative and active learning bidirectional platform, where students from Portuguese and North American universities have been cooperating for several years to enhance their technical and linguistic competences whilst developing intercultural skills. By bringing together future Translators and Technical Writers into a multicultural simulated setting, students are given the opportunity to learn from each other and interact via technology-mediated communication. Yet, this endeavour revealed to be extremely demanding mostly due to cultural misunderstandings that occurred during virtual communication exchanges. Accordingly, a cultural mediation intervention plan was developed and implemented by the authors as a strategy to overcome these problems and strengthen virtual teamwork interaction. This plan was designed to raise cultural awareness of the self and the other and was divided into 4 separate phases: 1) the cultural awareness initial stage, followed by 2) peer-to-peer exchange of the pre-learning questionnaires, 3) the completion of the Cultural Self-Awareness Questionnaire, concluding with 4) the analysis of the results and discussion in class. This study addresses the Cultural Self-Awareness Questionnaire. The results and outcomes of this questionnaire are analysed and discussed and new avenues for research will be presented and proposed.